So George Zimmerman was found
not guilty of second degree murder, after shooting teenager Trayvon Martin, in
what a jury found was self-defence. Now I’m not going to criticise the
reasoning or try to disassemble the arguments of either defence or prosecution
in that case. But what I am going to criticise is the fact that the stand your
ground (self-defense) law which he relied on seems to only be clear cut, if you
kill someone.
The case of Marissa Alexander,
as reported by CBS on the 12 of May of this year, shows that if you fire a gun
at someone and intentionally miss, stand your ground is not an available
defence. To give some background, Ms Alexander had taken out a protective order
against her husband, whom she alleged was physically abusive. When he entered
her home and began allegedly acting in a way that caused her to fear for her
life, she got hold of a gun and fired warning shots in the hope it would stop
him.
She was handed a 20-year
sentence for her heinous crime.
Reasons that this is stupid:
Her husband was in violation
of a protective order. He shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Why
does a man who is technically trespassing, not qualify as a threat for the
purposes of self-defense? Why is afforded the protection of the law when there
was a specific order in place, intended to protect the defendant in this case?
You could say, as some have,
that discharging a firearm without the intention of hitting a specific target
is more dangerous than aiming it at someone. If you’re shooting at someone (and
can aim effectively) you at least know where the bullets are going.
This would be a valid
argument, if Ms Alexander had inadvertently killed or injured a passer-by or
someone else’s properly. But she didn’t. To say that she could have, makes the
assumption that cases cannot be assessed on their individual merits. A plane
could have crashed into the house before she fired the gun, a ninja could have
leapt from the roof and cut her husband’s head off. If you’re talking about
what could have happened, you’re dealing with a set of potentially unlimited
possibilities.
Now the big one; the
difference with the Zimmerman case.
The Zimmerman case is later
verdict, only being reported in the last few days, however, the core concept of
the two cases would seem to be the same. The defendant feared for their life
and discharged a firearm in appreciation of this fear. The difference, Mr
Zimmerman, killed the person who caused him this fear. Now I don’t want to get
into the issue of whether or not he genuinely feared for his life. This isn't a
critique of his case, more an examination of the stand your ground defence.
This tells us that the laws on
self-defence in Florida are apparently easier to apply, when someone’s dead. If
Ms Alexander had killed her husband, then logically (based on the core concepts
of her case and Mr Zimmerman’s) she would have been found not guilty. The conclusion
I can draw from that is that one of these verdicts makes absolutely no sense.
To add to that the only advice
I would give to Florida residents is if you fear for your life and have a gun,
by all means shoot, but for god’s sake, make sure you kill someone, else you’ll
end up in prison.
